You can

you can forward the great consummation. cross, or you can carry into more glorious completeness, the eternal counsel of the Father, that "where sin abounded grace should much more abound; that as sin had reigned unto death, even so should grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Have you learnt the notes of that new song which none but the redeemed can know? Is Christ the joy and hope of your being? Is freedom from sin, a larger, freer, purer, more Christlike life, the one pining desire of your heart? Be patient, then, and still brace yourself to hope and to endure. Fight the good fight of faith; endure the hardness of the present discipline; lift the cross and bear it bravely to the end; for God's eye foresees the day which from yours is veiled, the day of universal deliverance, the day of restitution of all things, the day of the unveiling of the new creation, where grace, having cast out sin, shall have enthroned righteousness for ever the day of the manifestation of the sons of God.

V.

The Penitent's Creed.

"He looketh upon men, and if any say, I have sinned, I have perverted that which was right, and it profited me not; He will deliver his soul from going into the pit, and his life shall see the light.”—JOB XXXIII. 27, 28.

I

NEVER open the Book of Job without fresh wonder at the wealth of Christian thought and feeling which it contains. There is a deep sense in which Christianity is older than the Incarnation. The Word was from the beginning, not in solitary majesty and splendour, but "rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth, and His delights were with the sons of men." The day is older than the dawn, because the sun is older than both of them. The grand thoughts about God and man, about the soul, truth, righteousness, and holiness, which Colenso

and other searchers may find embedded in the mud of Pagan literature, mark the early dawning of that light of the sun of truth, the living Word, whose beams were in the fulness of time to shine with meridian splendour on the world. But man was made to live, not in the dawn, but in the daylight. The fact that there were foreshinings of the Advent, heralds of the expected One in all nations, but made it the more certain that the Desire of all Nations must at the appointed time appear. But there is one fountain both of the dawn and of the daylight; and what gleams of truth were shooting athwart the darkness of the Pagan sky, were the rays of that advancing sun.

Among the books of the Old Testament, in which the light was openly enshrined, none seems to me to shine with a fuller, steadier lustre than this Book of Job. It seems to lift itself high above the level of the surrounding darkness, and to catch, while night is on all the desert, the full glow of that dayspring which was rising to irradiate the world. The thoughts of it, the very idea of it, are Christian to the core. The Word, who was with God, but who was in the world from the beginning, was

with the man who wrote this book. It is Divine truth which it utters, it is Divine wisdom which it unfolds, it is Divine love which it reveals, as behind all the struggle and the suffering which God sends for the discipline of mankind. Nowhere is there a grander, clearer cry for a Mediator than in the sublime passage, "For He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both. Let Him take His rod away from me, and let not His fear terrify me : then would I speak, and not fear Him; but it is not so with me." And nowhere is there a more comprehensive description of his qualifications and office than in the very chapter from which I have taken my text. "Behold, I am according to thy wish in God's stead: I also am formed out of the clay. Behold, my terror shall not make thee afraid, neither shall my hand be heavy upon thee." There are those who believe that Elihu is the Mediator. That the Angel who dwelt in the bush, who was with the Church in the wilderness, with Joshua before Jericho, with Gideon by the threshing-floor, was, in the person of Elihu, with the patriarch-the daysman, the